Extraterrestrial radio emission was first reported in 1933 by Karl Jansky, an engineer at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, while he was searching for the cause of shortwave interference. Jansky had mounted a directional radio antenna on a turntable so that he could point it at different parts of the sky to determine the direction of the interfering signals. He not only detected interference from distant thunderstorms but also located a source of radio “noise” from the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. This first detection of cosmic radio waves received much attention from the public but only passing notice from the astronomical community.

Grote Reber, a radio engineer and amateur radio operator, built a 9.5-metre parabolic reflector in his backyard in Wheaton, Illinois, U.S., to continue Jansky’s investigation of cosmic radio noise. In 1944 he published the first radio map of the sky. After World War II ended, the technology that had been developed for military radar was applied to astronomical research. Radio telescopes of increasing size and sophistication were built first in Australia and Great Britain and later in the United States and other countries.

Principles of operation

Radio telescopes vary widely, but they all have two basic components: (1) a large radio antenna and (2) a sensitive radiometer, or radio receiver. The sensitivity of a radio telescope—i.e., the ability to measure weak sources of radio emission—depends both on the area and efficiency of the antenna and on the sensitivity of the radio receiver used to amplify and to detect the signals. For broadband continuum emission over a range of wavelengths, the sensitivity also depends on the bandwidth of the receiver. Because cosmic radio sources are extremely weak, radio telescopes are usually very large—up to hundreds of metres across—and use the most sensitive radio receivers available. Moreover, weak cosmic signals can be easily masked by terrestrial radio interference, and great effort is taken to protect radio telescopes from man-made emissions.

The most familiar type of radio telescope is the radio reflector consisting of a parabolic antenna, which operates in the same manner as a television satellite dish to focus the incoming radiation onto a small antenna called the feed, a term that originated with antennas used for radar transmissions (seefigure). This type of telescope is also known as the dish, or filled-aperture, telescope. In a radio telescope the feed is typically a waveguide horn and transfers the incoming signal to the sensitive radio receiver. Solid-state amplifiers that are cooled to very low temperatures to reduce significantly their internal noise are used to obtain the best possible sensitivity.

In some radio telescopes the parabolic surface is equatorially mounted, with one axis parallel to the rotation axis of Earth. Equatorial mounts are attractive because they allow the telescope to follow a position in the sky as the Earth rotates by moving the antenna about a single axis parallel to the Earth’s axis of rotation. But equatorially mounted radio telescopes are difficult and expensive to build. In most modern radio telescopes, a digital computer is used to drive the telescope about the azimuth and elevation axes to follow the motion of a radio source across the sky.

In the simplest form of radio telescope, the receiver is placed directly at the focal point of the parabolic reflector, and the detected signal is carried by cable along the feed support structure to a point near the ground where it can be recorded and analyzed. However, it is difficult in this type of system to access the instrumentation for maintenance and repair, and weight restrictions limit the size and number of individual receivers that can be installed on the telescope. More often, a secondary reflector is placed in front of (Cassegrain focus) or behind (Gregorian focus) the focal point of the paraboloid to focus the radiation to a point near the vertex, or centre, of the main reflector. Multiple feeds and receivers may be located at the vertex where there is more room, where weight restrictions are less stringent, and where access for maintenance and repair is more straightforward. Secondary focus systems also have the advantage that both the primary and secondary reflecting surfaces may be carefully shaped so as to improve the gain over that of a simple parabolic antenna.

Earlier radio telescopes used a symmetric tripod or quadrapod structure to hold the feed or secondary reflector, but such an arrangement blocks some of the incoming radiation, and the reflection of signals from the support legs back into the receiver distorts the response. In newer designs, the feed or secondary reflector is placed off the central axis and does not block the incoming signal. Off-axis radio telescopes are thus more sensitive and less affected by interference reflected from the support structure into the feed.

The performance of a radio telescope is limited by various factors. The accuracy of a reflecting surface may depart from the ideal shape because of manufacturing irregularities. Wind load can exert force on the telescope. Thermal deformations cause differential expansion and contraction. As the antenna is pointed to different parts of the sky, deflections occur due to changes in gravitational forces. Departures from a perfect parabolic surface become important when they are a few percent or more of the wavelength of operation. Since small structures can be built with greater precision than larger ones, radio telescopes designed for operation at millimetre wavelengths are typically only a few tens of metres across, whereas those designed for operation at centimetre wavelengths range up to 300 metres (1,000 feet) in diameter. For operation at relatively long metre wavelengths where the reflecting surface need not have an accuracy better than a few centimetres, it becomes practical to build very large fixed structures in which the reflecting surface can be made of simple “chicken wire” fencing or even parallel rows of wires.

Traditionally the effect of gravity has been minimized by designing the movable structure to be as stiff as possible in order to reduce the deflections resulting from gravity. A more effective technique, based on the principle of homology, allows the structure to deform under the force of gravity, and the cross section and weight of each member of the movable structure are chosen to cause the gravitational forces to deform the reflecting structure into a new paraboloid with a slightly different focal point. It is then necessary only to move the feed or secondary reflector to maintain optimum performance. Homologous designs have become possible only since the development of computer-aided structural simulations known as the finite element method.

Some radio telescopes, particularly those designed for operation at very short wavelengths, are placed in protective enclosures called radomes that can nearly eliminate the effect of both wind loading and temperature differences throughout the structure. Special materials that exhibit very low absorption and reflection of radio waves have been developed for such structures, but the cost of enclosing a large antenna in a suitable temperature-controlled radome may be almost as much as the cost of the movable antenna itself.

The cost of constructing an antenna with a very large aperture can be greatly reduced by fixing the structure to the ground and moving either the feed or the secondary reflector to steer the beam in the sky. However, for parabolic reflecting surfaces, the beam can be steered in this way over only a limited range of angle without introducing aberration and a loss of signal strength.

Radio telescopes are used to measure broad-bandwidth continuum radiation as well as narrow-bandwidth spectroscopic features due to atomic and molecular lines found in the radio spectrum of astronomical objects. In early radio telescopes, spectroscopic observations were made by tuning a receiver across a sufficiently large frequency range to cover the various frequencies of interest. Because the spectrometer had a narrow frequency range, this procedure was extremely time-consuming, and it greatly restricted observations. Modern radio telescopes observe simultaneously at a large number of frequencies by dividing the signals up into as many as several thousand separate frequency channels that can range over a much larger total bandwidth of tens to hundreds of megahertz.

The most straightforward type of radio spectrometer employs a large number of filters, each tuned to a separate frequency and followed by a separate detector that combines the signal from the various filters to produce a multichannel, or multifrequency, receiver. Alternatively, a single broad-bandwidth signal may be converted into digital form and analyzed by the mathematical process of autocorrelation and Fourier transforms (see below). In order to detect faint signals, the receiver output is often averaged over periods of up to several hours to reduce the effect of noise generated by thermal radiation in the receiver.

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